


True Glory

by l_cloudy



Category: Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 15:00:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13216260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/l_cloudy/pseuds/l_cloudy
Summary: “They come from the pit, two dead men, a heart in their hands, and I know that I have seen true glory.”AU: Kaladin and Dalinar fall together into the chasms.





	True Glory

**Author's Note:**

> End of the year cleanup or, stop letting unfinished fic rot on your hard drive, self. Clean them up and air them out!

Kaladin woke up in the dark, a distant scream resounding in his ears. _Sly_. What had he done to her?

He rose slowly, checking for injuries. There was one thin strip of golden light shining over his face, far too bright, but the rest of the chasm was deep in darkness. He could make out shapes all around him, broken bodies of the men and women who’d been crossing the bridge when it had collapsed. It felt almost like being in Sadeas’s army again, down in the shadowed chasm surrounded by the dead. How many of those bodies would be of people he knew? Kaladin thought frantically, trying to remember who he’d seen on the bridge.

Nobody from Bridge Four; they had all been behind, waiting to cross. Adolin had been in the vanguard with his noisy betrothed and, besides, he’d been wearing Plate. Last Kaladin had seen, he’d been running towards his father –

 _Dalinar_ , Kaladin remembered. Dalinar Kholin had been on the bridge. Had Adolin got to him in time?

He put his hand in his pocket, searching for Stormlight, but found all his spheres drained. Had he managed to hold Stormlight as he fell? Why, then, did he feel so empty?

The body nearest to him was that of a lighteyed lady, her silk dress pierced by arrows, grey-haired matted with blood from where she’d hit her head against a rock. Kaladin’s hands found the oversized left sleeve of her dress, ripping her pouch open. She didn’t have much – no maps or equipment, and only a handful of mostly dun spheres. It would have to do.

He looked at the body next to hers, and swore.

It was Dalinar.

He fell to his knees next to the highprince’s still body, frantically searching for a pulse. Storms, if Dalinar was dead… He was warm, and there were no wounds that he could see, but that didn’t mean anything. He slid two fingers under Dalinar’s collar, praying – to whoever would listen.

Please, Kaladin thought. _Please_.

He felt a pulse under his fingertips, steady and surprisingly strong. Kaladin exhaled in relief, moving back and reaching back for one of the spheres.

“Sir?” he called out, shaking the Highprince gently by the shoulder. “Dalinar?”

He lifted Dalinar’s eyelid with his thumb, bringing the sphere closer to check the contraction of the pupil. He groaned softly.

“Sorry,” Kaladin murmured, not really meaning it. How was the man even alive? Had Kaladin done something, saved him as well?

Dalinar’s eyes snapped open. He blinked, looking a Kaladin.

“Captain? What –”

“The bridge collapsed,” said Kaladin. “We fell to the bottom of the chasm. Can you feel your arms and legs?”

“I… yes. Did the Parshendi attack?”

“That’s good,” Kaladin nodded. “Try to sit up, slowly. I think they did – I heard horns. Then we fell. If you can stand up, I’m going to see if anyone else survived.”

Nobody else had. He found food and spheres, but no maps. One of the dead men, a lighteyed officer, had a sword by his side. Kaladin grabbed it, then went looking for a spear for himself. He still had his knife, the one he’d used to threaten that stupid lordling in the arena, and he got a dagger for Dalinar as well.

“They’re all dead, sir,” Kaladin reported, laying the weapons on the ground next to the Highprince. “And your army will think we are, too. Are you hurt?”

“No,” said Dalinar. The look he turned on Kaladin was one of surprise. “That is strange, isn’t it? We fell hundreds of feet. We should be dead.”

“I don’t know.” _Syl_ , he thought. What happened to her? Why had she screamed? “Maybe we were lucky.”

“Luck.” Dalinar shook his head. “Is that how you survived the fall with the assassin, Captain? Luck?”

Syl had wanted him to tell Dalinar the truth, and maybe he should have. But Syl wasn’t here now, and he couldn’t surgebind without her.

“I never die when I should,” he said, softly. “Guess that makes me lucky.”

He helped Dalinar to his feet, then put all their spheres and food into a leather satchel. He retrieved coats from the body of fallen officers and rolled them together. Then he looked at Dalinar.

“Do you think they’ll try for a retrieval operation, sir?” he asked. “We’re out of range, but probably Adolin… he’ll want to send someone.” Or probably come himself; Kholins were stubborn, and nothing if not devoted to each other. News of Dalinar’s death would’ve been all over the warcamps by now, travelling by spanreed to Alethkar and beyond.

“Yes.” Dalinar sounded odd, probably thinking the same thing. “But they probably won’t get a patrol together before the Highstorm hits.”

Kaladin swore under his breath. _Walking back, then._ He tried not to think of when he’d been flying.

“I couldn’t find any maps,” he told Dalinar. “Truth be told, I don’t even know which side of the plateau we fell from. If there’s a Highstorm coming…”

“Tomorrow evening,” said Dalinar. “We’ll wait for the sun to rise and walk to the warcamps, and with luck I’ll manage to get there just in time to hear Sadeas give his condolences to Navani again.”

Anger rose in his voice as he spoke, and Kaladin watched, unsettled. Despite the Blackthorn’s reputation he’d grown up hearing, in the months spent in Dalinar’s guard he’d never seen the Highprince this close to losing control. It was a disturbing sight – it reminded him of those sad, lean months in his youth when Roshone had been winning and his father had begun turning to drink. It felt _wrong_.

“I believe Brightness Navani is perfectly capable of handling Sadeas, sir,” he said, and felt strangely satisfied when Dalinar’s angry frown gave way to something very much resembling a besotted smile.

“She is,” said Dalinar. “Storms, I hope she’ll be able to keep Elhokar under control. I worry about that boy – if he thinks I’m dead…”

Thinking of Elhokar led naturally to thoughts of Moash, of Graves, of his lonely prison cell. Thoughts of Syl, and Kaladin cleared his throat before he could spend too long lingering on those.

“Should we move somewhere else and make camp?”

He didn’t need to ask twice. The chasm full of bodies would be swarm with rotspren in a matter of hours, and they both heard reports of that chasmfiend. Dalinar nodded and Kaladin followed him, as they circled around the plateau and the one right after and the one in front of that until they found a chasm that was narrow, the walls very low – half the distance they’d fallen from, if that.

“If you’d worn a Shardplate, sir,” said Kaladin, staring at the distant sliver of evening sky, “you’d probably been able to climb up there.”

“You know I don’t have Shardplate, soldier,” said Dalinar. He sounded amused.

Kaladin spread the coats he’d taken from the bodies on the ground, then sat down, Dalinar next to him. He wrapped his own coat, the one Dalinar had been wearing at the Tower, close around his shoulders.

“I told you _you_ should’ve taken some of Adolin’s new Shards. He had enough spares laying around to offer me a pair, I’m sure he came to you first.”

“If I’d worn Plate,” said Dalinar. “I wouldn’t have fallen in the first place. There’s not much use in worrying about what could have been.”

The words, pronounced in Dalinar’s steady, pragmatic tone, sounded so much like something Syl could have said. Kaladin’s parents as well: Hesina’s cheer and Lirin’s calm resignation, so different from each other, had always shared the same silent understanding that things that could not be changed should not be regretted. Kaladin wondered, suddenly, if it was something only he felt, a flaw within himself, that he could not let the past go.

Dalinar was looking at him, Kaladin saw, with a faintly bemused expression on his face. He realized he must have said some of that out loud when Dalinar spoke.

“I hadn’t thought – you have family?”

“Just my parents,” said Kaladin. “In Sadeas, not far from the border.”

All his thoughts of his family were crystallized in time. Since sending the letter, he had tried to forget; he never allowed himself to wonder how his parents would be now, if they were still in Hearthstone, if they thought him dead. It was odd to sit there in the chasm and tell Dalinar Kholin about his life, his past and his present colliding.

“I forget, sometimes,” said Dalinar, quietly. “How young you are. Renarin’s age, is that right?”

Kaladin nodded, slowly, feeling uncertain. He was not sure he liked Dalinar’s easiness, his familiarity in comparing him to one of his sons. Dalinar, he had come to believe, was a truly good man. Dalinar was also born of a world as different from Kaladin’s own as the chasms of the Plains were different from the fields of his childhood. It did Kaladin no good to let himself forget that.

“You must have been very young when you left home.”

It was not a question. Still. “I was fifteen,” said Kaladin. “When I joined the army.”

 _Amaram’s army_. The words hung heavy in the air between them, and Kaladin held his breath, waiting for them to fall.

Thankfully, Dalinar did not speak of what they were both thinking. Instead he said. “I was about that age when my brother began his campaign. A little older, maybe. I daresay our town was about the same size as the one you’re from.”

“Really?” He couldn’t keep the curiosity from his voice. He tried to picture Elhokar’s self-important airs and Adolin’s embroidered coats in Hearthstone, and came up short. Dalinar, though… with his steady manners and unadorned Shardplate. Perhaps.

“Really,” said Dalinar. “My father thought Gavilar was a fool, with all his talks of conquest. Our cousins in Kholinar wouldn’t give us the time of the day. But my brother was nothing if not storming stubborn.”

Looking at Dalinar, he could believe it. Dalinar threw him a look and said. “It’s a quality I’ve come to appreciate in others.”

Had Dalinar just made a _joke_? Kaladin had a sudden flash to being sixteen again, being ribbed by his sergeant. He said. “I can’t picture our citylord going out and conquering the kingdom. He wouldn’t last a week.”

His tone – not as light as he’d meant it to be -  skirted the edge of insolence, but Dalinar should be used to it by now. The Highprince just nodded, slowly, as if he found that reasonable.

“Not the martial type, I take it?”

“You could say that.”

“What is the name of your citylord?” Dalinar asked. “If it’s in Sadeas, I might know him.”

“You do,” said Kaladin. “It’s Roshone.”

He did not say, _Brightlord Roshone_. Dalinar didn’t correct him; he must be thinking, as Kaladin was, back to their conversation in the cell, to Roshone’s crimes and his connection to Amaram, and the high-handed claim that he could do no more damage where he’d been sent.

Dalinar gave him one of those heavy, long looks. “I take it he hasn’t improved.”

An array of answers passed through Kaladin’s mind. In the end, he didn’t say anything.

Eventually Dalinar said, “Roshone couldn’t manage to conquer a barn. I think the kingdom is safe.” And then he said. “We should eat some of the rations. I’ll tell you the story, if you’d like.”

“The story?”

“Conquering the kingdom,” said Dalinar. “Well, some of it. The part Jasnah hasn’t written in her histories. Renarin has never been interested in war stories and Adolin has heard it more times than he can count. I don’t get to tell it that often, anymore.”

 _I’m not one of your sons_ , Kaladin almost said, but Dalinar plainly did not seem to care. He opened the satchel and took out their wrapped food – dried meat, and soulcast grain, a far cry from Rock’s stews.

“Yes,” he said. “I’d like that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone! I began writing this forever ago (years?); it was originally going to be the prelude to a canon divergent AU, now it’s just a self-contained character piece that uses the chasm scene a set-up. HOWEVER feel free to picture Kaladin finding out Dalinar had Amaram investigated and then swearing the third ideal in the chasms.
> 
> I’m on [tumblr](http://liesmyth.tumblr.com/)!


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